Paula Uimonen

Her research on digital media and intercultural interaction at a national art institute in Tanzania was published in the monograph Digital Drama. Teaching and Learning Art and Media in Tanzania (Uimonen 2012), with a website at http://innovativeethnographies.net/digitaldrama. In another project, an anti-corruption campaign by Tanzanian musicians was presented in an ethnographic road movie Chanjo ya Rushwa (2013), available online at https://vimeo.com/paulauimonen.

African Women Writers

This project explores transnational dynamics in the literary production of African women writers in Nigeria and Tanzania, with an emphasis on feminism and cosmopolitanism. Drawing on anthropological theory and method, it is an ethnographic study centered on a select number of contemporary women writers in different genres (novels, short stories, poetry, plays and children books) and the cultural circumstances of their literary production. Theoretically, the project centres on transnational interactions and tensions in literary production in and of Africa. As a literary and social category, African women writers bring attention to two interrelated aspects of the cosmopolitan/vernacular dynamic in world literature. As women writers, their work highlights the transnational tensions of feminism, thus demanding a more pluralistic approach to issues relating to women and gender, as explored in African feminism. As African writers, their works exemplify the cultural construction of Africanness in a globalized world, thus bringing forth more critical forms of cosmopolitanism, not least Pan-Africanism. Rather than privileging Western circuits of African literature, this project takes an ethnographic approach, focusing on literary production from within, thus building on recent scholarship that accentuates the African context of literary production. In addition to examining local literary worlds, this project investigates digital mediations in literary production and transnational exchange, including social and visual media. Fieldwork in Nigeria and Tanzania started in 2016. More information about the project can be found on the website womenwriters.one .

Publications & Presentations

(Uimonen 2017) Efuru@50. A documentary film based on ethnographic research in Nigeria in 2016, capturing the celebration of Flora Nwapa, pioneer of African women’s literature. https://youtu.be/EndOXak9ESQ

(Uimonen 2017) Kvinnor med kraft att förändra en kontinent. Public lecture at Kulturhuset Fanfaren, Farsta, Sweden, 26 October.

(Uimonen 2016) Cosmopolitan feminism. From Flora Nwapa’s Efuru to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We should all be feminists. Paper presented at Efuru@50, Maiduguri, Nigeria, 1 December

(Uimonen 2016). Adichie in Sweden. African Women Writers, Social media and Cosmopolitan Feminism. Paper presented at Nordic Africa Days, Uppsala, Sweden, 23-24 September.

(Uimonen 2016). Adichie in Sweden. African Women Writers, Social media and Cosmopolitan Feminism. Paper presented at FEMRITE@20-Rethinking African Literature, School of Women and Gender Studies, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, 28-30 July

Visit Paula Uimonen's university homepage